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could handle it. In any event, Marsden materialized at rehearsals
with his Les Paul and it was off to the races.
    “I was with a band called UFO,” says
Marsden, asked about his baby steps into the biz, “and that was my first pro
gig and I was about 20, 21. I had had gigs offered to me before that; I had
auditioned for stuff, and then I would get the gig and then realize, I don’t
really want to do this. One of the bands was a band called Renaissance, who did
pretty well in America, and I think Canada. But if you can imagine their
music and me, it just didn’t fit.
    “You see, in those days, when you
auditioned for people, they kind of didn’t tell you who the band was until you
got in the audition. So you found yourself applying for a job you didn’t want
anyway. It was this thing of turning professional, you know? So that was kind
of a funny thing. You would get the gig and then you would say actually, I don’t
want it, and then you’d see the guys who auditioned two weeks later and they
would say, ‘Well, I thought you joined Renaissance?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, well
I turned it down.’”
    Marsden had only briefly flashed through
UFO, spending about ten months with the band and doing a bit of writing on Phenomenon ,
before moving on. “I was with a group called Babe Ruth,” he remembers. “We did
pretty good in Canada, actually. I had a desire to write a certain way when I
was younger, and I did write that way, and put that basically down onto the
album. But the older I got, the better I became at it. Then there
was Wild Turkey, with one of the guys from Jethro Tull, and we were kind of
into an Allman Brothers-type thing in those days, and I’m talking a long time
ago. But we definitely carried some of that forward into Whitesnake with the
twin guitar thing.”
    Next came the aforementioned Paice Ashton
Lord, and after that, well, Marsden wound up inventing the Whitesnake sound
along with Moody and Coverdale. It was Marsden who suggested bassist Neil
Murray, who had been playing with fusion band National Health, might fill the
bill. Coverdale had been dismayed that most of the bass players they
had been checking out had been inspired by the punk rock of the
day, and that his music, especially something like “Ain’t No Love” was going to
require someone a little more studied and old school. Murray, despite his disconcerting
“straightness” fitted the bill, most notably, due to his melodic sensibility.
    “I always wanted to work with another
guitar player, with the twin guitar thing, because I loved the
Allmans and Skynyrd —and Thin Lizzy,” explains Micky Moody on the
acquisition of Marsden. “Those are the kinds of bands I just like, the
sound of two guitars. So Bernie came in the band, who I’d known already for a
number of years anyway, and he used to play with Paice, Ashton and Lord, so he
was part of that Deep Purple family tree. We went into it not really knowing
what we were going to play [ laughs ]. We could only rely on the
guys in the band and what we were listening to. Neil listened to a lot of
jazz/funk, I think probably more than the rest of us, and he also played more
of that stuff. Coverdale was into that stuff as well, and I listened to some of
it. But we just went with what we had; obviously David had a lot of ideas for
songs and we worked them around. But that’s why the first two albums are a
little bit diverse. There’s all kinds of stuff on there based on what we were
listening to. I think it was probably Ready An’ Willing where we
actually found our sound.”

    At the outer edges of the
Deep Purple family tree, there’s yet another obscure connection, that which
links Whitesnake bassist Neil Murray to Bernie Marsden.
    “In the mid-’60s I was a drummer and wasn’t
listening to bass very much,” begins Murray. “I took up bass when I was 17 or
so, and the next few years I’m learning to play, and probably would have been a
fairly standard blues rock player